Republican file photoShellyanne Toro, left, and Alexandria Velez, both 10, work with Sister Jane Morrissey, Sister of Saint Joseph, at the Homework House at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Holyoke, in this file photo.

God bless the sisters in the Catholic Church. Through decades of history, they’ve lived the beatitudes. They educated many of us, given us shelter when we needed it and prepared us for lives of service and parenthood.

I had 12 years of Catholic education with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Springfield, and a great-aunt who was a comptroller for the Sisters of Providence in Holyoke under whom my mother studied to be a registered nurse.

I never saw any of these religious women, some of whom reside now in memory as quite ancient figures covered head to toe in congregational habits, as anything other than women serving their God and their Church to whom they vowed themselves.

Their faith-filled lives conveyed that you were expected not to just learn the catechism from them but to go forth and apply it for a better world.

It wasn’t that any of them were saints, but they endured and they taught you to endure. They lived lives with meaning in a material-bound world, and they avoided getting philosophically mired in Vatican teachings about infallibility and Catholicism being the one true apostolic faith.

They actually got on with Christ’s teachings to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and stand with the persecuted.

They were church; something especially true as women gained access to more professions in the secular world and many women religious as well as priests left their congregations.

They continued to teach, to bring health care to those without access to it and to reflect among themselves and within themselves where their resources and faith were most needed. Some went into prison ministry, some elected to live in poor neighborhoods and some went to work among the addicted.

The majority of these sisters today in the United States are gray-haired and no longer young, but they continue to be the communion in the Church. They represent lives lived in loyalty to community and this loyalty continues, even in the wake of the Vatican’s cowardly attack on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.

Cowardly because many Catholics disagree with the Church’s teachings on birth control, gay marriage, artificial birth control and the ban on women’s ordination.

Rather than review the theology and historical context on which these teachings are based and engage in enlightened dialogue, the Vatican has investigated religious women and proclaimed them “radical feminists.”

This is supposedly meant to disgrace them in the eyes of the laity, though what this terminology exactly means is unclear. Aging women as radical feminists is actually a rather uplifting image.

I remembering hearing Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the former Archbishop of Boston now disgraced on this side of the Atlantic anyway for his cover up of pedophile priests, give a lecture in Springfield on the word “radical,” which he insisted in its Latin form means “grassroots.”

Well, feminism in its true meaning is about equality. So, “radical feminists” as applied to women religious, would be women seeking grassroots equality for all. Wasn’t that what Christ wanted?

It isn’t what the Vatican wants.

The Vatican wants the conference, which represents about 80 percent of women religious in the United States, to be placed under the control of a Seattle bishop.

In a recent interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Franciscan Sister Pat Farrell, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, told reporter Joshua J. McElwee:

“I think the inference that many people could draw from the publication of the Vatican document is that we are unfaithful, that we are not in communion with the Church. We really do not see ourselves in that way.”

Farrell goes on to say that the “genuine questions” raised by religious congregations are
“a sign of our deepest faithfulness to the church -- questions that the people of God need to raise, that we need to talk about together in a climate of genuine dialogue”

What the women religious seek in their courage to raise questions is indeed not division but dialogue.

The question is: Will the Vatican engage in enough transparency to allow for honest discussion and a credible way forward without further alienation?

As Farrell said: “We do want to faithfully raise questions of concern, but we do not want to do it in a way that further polarizes. And that’s a tricky path to walk.”

The answer of the path taken by both sides as this progresses will show who really is faithful to Christ’s vision and how inclusively the Catholic Church in the United States will reflect that moral vision.